PNS (POCLAD News Service) May 2015– U.S. Health and Human Services director, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, today announced plans for a National Day of Observance to mark the birthday of the oldest person in the United States.

“May 10, 1886 is a day we simply cannot overlook,” Burwell noted. “On that little-noted day, without fanfare, an American was born who has surpassed all others in longevity, changed the very direction of our nation and the character of our culture. We’re celebrating, of course, the birth of Corporate P. Hood.”

Well…maybe not celebrate exactly, but remember for sure. For that was the day on which the U.S. Supreme Court’s Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad decision marked the formal beginning of the concept we now call “corporate personhood.”

Corporate P. Hood was a long time a-borning, its gestation taking place in the womb of the U.S. judicial system. As this artificial “person” has had a most profound influence, we would do well to know the story of its birth.

Before the 1886 Santa Clara case, corporate attorneys had tried any number of times to shoehorn their clients into constitutional protections intended for actual human beings only to be rebuffed by the courts.

  • 1873, Slaughterhouse Cases: the court said, “…the main purpose of the last three Amendments [13, 14, 15] was the freedom of the African race, the security and perpetuation of that freedom and their protection from the oppression of the white men who had formerly held them in slavery.” Corporations were not included in these protections.
  • 1877, Munn v Illinois: the court ruled that the 14th Amendment cannot be used to protect corporations from state law.
  • 1882, San Mateo County v Southern Pacific Railroad: the court argued that corporations were persons and that the committee drafting the 14th Amendment had intended the word person to mean corporations as well as natural persons. The court did not rule on corporate personhood, but this is the case in which they heard the argument.
  • 1886, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Corp.: the court offers a fine example of why law is not some revealed truth inscribed in stone, but an opinion made real by those with the power to do so. A headnote, written by the Court’s clerk, J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and NY Railway Co., stated: “One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that ‘corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’ Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said the court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” Davis even wrote Waite a memo to make sure his note agreed with Waite’s thinking. Waite replied that it did and let Davis decide whether to mention anything about it in his report!
  • 1889, Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad v Beckwith: the Court removed any remaining doubt by ruling that “corporations are persons within the meaning of the clause in question (14th Amendment).”

Read the rest of the POCLAD article by Mike Ferner nad Virginia Rasmussen here.